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Wednesday, January 07, 2015

Personal branding is the process of promoting your professional image across multiple outlets. Professionals have used personal branding for years in order to obtain career opportunities or to drive traffic to their personal website.

One technique that has been discussed among marketers more often than before is the use of personal branding as a marketing tool for a separate business. This means that more employees are using their personal social media accounts to support the company they work for or own.

“Using one’s personal social media pages to promote their company benefits both the company and the individual,“ said Andrew Rice, owner of a Minneapolis website design business. “Not only are they building awareness for their company, they are improving and promoting their personal reputation as an industry expert. This will only help them in the future if they are jump hunting, etc.”

If you utilize personal branding to promote a larger organization, employers will be impressed by your initiative and willingness to use every resource you can find to enhance the marketing strategy of a company.

One local business owner has begun to take advantage of personal branding to support her family business. Alethia Erotas, who works at her family’s home building company, uses her personal social media accounts to drive traffic and promote her company. The result is that the company now has two brands promoting one.

“First I spent a lot of time sharing home improvement and home building articles on my personal Twitter and Facebook. This helped me gain a following of users interested in that niche,” said Erotas. “I proved that I was a trusted source for industry information and I began promoting my company’s blog articles to my followers. This drove a significant amount of traffic and conversion to the company site. It is a win-win situation because my followers are still being supplied with useful and interesting information.”

While Erotas promoted her company using her personal social accounts, her family’s company continued to promote its brand through the company social accounts. This practice doubled the traffic to her company website.

If you have not thought about using your personal social accounts to promote the organization in which you are employed, it might be time to consider it. Your employer will be moved by your inventiveness and your organization can benefit greatly from your work. The marketing potential of personal branding is limitless.